‘Illegal Spying Below’ blimp flies above NSA data center (PHOTOS)

A coalition of grassroots groups from across the political spectrum joined forces to fly an airship over the NSA's data center in Bluffdale, Utah on Friday, June 27, 2014, to protest the government's illegal mass surveillance program. (Photo by Greenpeace)

Anti-surveillance activists flew a blimp above the National Security Agency’s massive, $1.5 billion data center in Bluffdale, Utah on Friday as an act of protest against the NSA’s contentious collection of vast amounts of the world’s digital data.

The airship belongs to the environmentalist organization
Greenpeace and was flown early Friday over the NSA’s newly
completed data center as a demonstration waged collectively by
that group and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a
California-based advocacy group that defends digital rights and
has fought tooth-and-nail against the United State intelligence
community’s surveillance programs since before former contractor
Edward Snowden began to leak classified secrets about those
operations last year. The Tenth Amendment Center, “a national
think tank that works to preserve and protect the principles of
strictly limited government through information, education and
activism,” also participated in the unannounced flight.

On Twitter, the EFF said the event was being conducted to
announce the organization’s “new campaign grading Congress on
surveillance reform,” now online at StandAgainstSpying.org.

“The goal of the congressional scorecard is to raise public
awareness about the surveillance debates taking place right now
and to create public pressure on individual members of Congress
and the president to take significant steps to reform NSA spying
in light of the information the public has learned over the past
year,” the website reads in part. “We aim to stop any bills
that would codify mass surveillance while at the same time
bolstering support for meaningful surveillance reform.”

Previously, legal counsel at the EFF has represented plaintiffs
in several cases waged against the NSA’s data collection
policies, including litigation that began before and after last
year’s Snowden revelations.

Parker Higgins, an activist with the EFF, told KSL’s Doug Wright early Friday that the blimp
was loaded in a trailer and hauled from California ahead of the
early morning launch. Flight restrictions, Higgins said,
prohibited the groups from getting the blimp airborne until after
7 a.m.

Soon after, however, the airship’s presence in the Bluffdale
airspace was unavoidable and passersby snapped photographs that
quickly circulated widely on the web. According to Higgins, the
number of cars seen pulling over to watch the blimp as he viewed
from above gave him the impression that the stunt “ended up
making the splash” that the groups had hoped for, and with,
so far, no negative repercussions.

"We checked in advance that everything was legal,"
Higgins told KSL, acknowledging that the flight brought the
Greenpeace and EFF-chartered blimp quite close to the US National
Guard’s training center at nearby Camp Williams. The NSA center
itself, according to blueprints previously published by Forbes,
encompasses around 100,000 square feet.

"At least for now, thumbing your nose at the government is
not illegal,” Higgins added. “We did not break the
law."

Previously, however, others with an interest in seeing the
Bluffdale data center from the air ended up on the radar of law
enforcement soon after. When Fox News rented a helicopter to
flight over the facility while it was still being constructed in
2012, the chopper’s pilot was visited by federal agents two weeks
later on a "national security matter.”

"The data center is this massive, sprawling complex. I've
seen pictures of it, but it's different from the air. You get a
sense, really, for the scope of this, the scale of what they're
doing there,” Higgins told Spencer Ackerman at The Guardian after Friday’s flight.

Friday’s flight also coincided with the US Office of the Director
of the National Intelligence’s publication of details pertaining to the use
of national security authorities to collect digital information —
endeavors that are indeed opposed by the EFF and other
anti-surveillance groups.